Vectorial versus configural encoding of Body Space A neural basis for a distinction between Body schema and Body image

A neural basis for a distinction between Body schema and Body image. The way in which space relationships are represented in the brain and intervene to organize our vision of a stable world in which we move our private body space has been the topic of lasting philosophical and scientific debates. In interdisciplinary workshop like this, each of us, depending on his own background and experiences, is necessarily coming with his biased point of view. Let me first briefly outline how my own itinerary, as an early trained neurobiologist (having to teach psychobiology in the faculty of sciences) lead me, as early as 1972, to confidently consider a functional segregation between body schema and body image as biologically and evolutionary founded. One of the most impressive features of our brain is its ability to process a continuous flow of multimodal information from internal and external sources thus producing an integrated and coherent central representation of our perceptible outside world and of both our perceived and unconsciously registered own body space. Motor action is assumed to play a crucial role in accounting for the astonishing capacity of the nervous system to extract regularity and covariant features from changing surroundings and body state, storing them in some central representation of both a predictable outside word and the private domestic body space which we inhabit. Additionally, inherited sensori-motor mechanisms intervene both for regulating the large spectrum of autonomic functions underlying body metabolic functions and for automatically framing the basic postural mechanisms underlying body's orientation in the field of gravity, and those anchoring oriented sense organs to targets located in a coherent, stable, and unified perceived world. ('Paillard, 1999b)